Food hygiene for farmers and growers

Failure to adopt basic food hygiene procedures can lead to contamination or damage

This guidance is for England

Farmers and growers must follow basic hygiene procedures to ensure hazards such as contamination arising from soil, water, fertilisers, pesticides, handling of waste, etc are prevented. Records relevant to food safety must also be kept.

EU Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs is aimed at ensuring that controls throughout the food chain are strengthened; it is executed and enforced in England by the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013. In particular, the legislation is intended to modernise, consolidate and simplify EU food hygiene legislation, and to apply effective and proportionate controls throughout the food chain from primary production to sale or supply to the final consumer (known as the farm-to-fork approach).

What types of businesses are covered?

Food businesses and food business operators are defined in Regulation (EC) 178/2002 laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety:

'food business' is defined as "any undertaking, whether for profit or not and whether public or private, carrying out any stage of production, processing and distribution of food"

'food business operator' is defined as "the natural or legal persons responsible for ensuring that the requirements of food law are met within the food business under their control"

One of the requirements of the EU Regulation is that, with few exceptions, all food businesses must be approved or registered with their local authority. More information on food business registration or approval is available on the GOV.UK website.

Conditions

The farm-to-fork approach of the legislation includes requirements for primary producers. EU Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 contains various conditions and guides to good hygiene practice, which food businesses, including farmers and growers, will have to comply with as appropriate. The requirements for farmers and growers are fairly basic hygiene procedures. As food businesses, they will have to ensure that hazards are controlled appropriately.

Good records help protect you and your business in the event of an animal feed or related human food-safety incident and are essential in order to quickly trace the origins of any problem.

Most of the information you need to keep will already be available as invoices, receipts, spray records, etc or as part of the requirements of farm or crop assurance schemes and you should not need to create many new records.

If you do need to record additional information, you may find it useful to complete a farm diary or notebook.

Penalties

Failure to comply with trading standards law can lead to enforcement action and to sanctions, which may include a fine and/or imprisonment. For more information please see 'Trading standards: powers, enforcement & penalties'.

Key legislation

EU Regulation (EC) No 178/2002laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety

This information is intended for guidance; only the courts can give an authoritative interpretation of the law.

The guide's 'Key legislation' links may only show the original version of the legislation, although some amending legislation is linked to separately where it is directly related to the content of a guide. Information on amendments to UK legislation can be found on each link's 'More Resources' tab; amendments to EU legislation are usually incorporated into the text.